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Some new research came out late last week on stay-at-home mothers that’s bound to create a new battleground in the so-called mommy wars. Gallup reports that stay-at-home mothers are more likely to experience depression, sadness, and anger than their counterparts who work for pay outside the home. Of the more than 60,000 women it interviewed, “women with young children at home who are employed for pay…report experiencing sadness and anger a lot of the day ‘yesterday,’” it says. Meanwhile, the emotional state of a mother who’s employed is about as strong as that of a working woman who doesn’t have children at home. It would seem, then, that it’s the staying at home part that’s causing the negative mental state.

What’s interesting, however, is how this breaks down by income. The traditional image of the stay-at-home mother is the middle- to upper-middle class woman whose family income allows her to choose to stay out of the workforce and be with her children full-time. (Exhibit A: Ann Romney.) But as I wrote previously, the face of stay-at-home mothers is changing. It seems they are increasingly lower-educated, foreign-born Hispanic women who may not have employment options that outweigh the cost of putting their children in childcare. Instead, they stay home to take care of their children, not because they necessarily think it’s the best way to raise a child, but because they can’t afford to do it any other way.

It may be these women who are skewing the numbers on happiness. While at every income level stay-at-home moms experience more sadness, anger, and depression than employed moms, middle- and high-income moms do fine on some other measurements. When it comes to “laughter, enjoyment, happiness, worry, stress, learning something interesting, and having a high life evaluation rating,” as Gallup puts it, higher income mothers in the home look pretty much the same as mothers in the workplace. Not so for low-income mothers.

Low-income stay-at-home mothers fare poorly on all of the above measurements. Those with annual household incomes of less than $36,000 are less likely to report smiling or laughing a lot the day before or to have experienced happiness or enjoyment. They are also slightly less likely to have learned something interesting. On the flip side, they are more likely to have experienced stress and worry on a daily basis than low-income mothers who work outside the home. All of this leads them to be more likely to be struggling than thriving in their lives overall – the opposite of the experience of employed mothers and women workers who don’t have children at home.

As Catherine Rampell noted, the plight of lower income mothers can only get us part of the way in explaining what’s causing the downward emotional trends for stay-at-home mothers. It also seems obvious that if low-income women aren’t drawing a paycheck, they’d be likely to experience more stress and worry just over the state of their finances. These findings do comport, however, with the notion that staying at home to raise kids may not be a choice freely entered into, but the only option available for lower-income women. That would make it harder to find pleasure and enjoyment in one’s situation, regardless of how much you love your kids.